“Five Four Whiskey,…Five Four Whiskey,…Niner Four Oscar.”

It was a simple radio recognition code from the past.

“Five Four Whiskey, this is Niner Four Oscar.”

The words were nonsensical to anyone who had not played an active role in the nightmare. It was not a threatening message. On the contrary, it was a sound that had meant help was within our grasp. It had come over static-filled airways many times, to reassure us that we were not alone. It was the thread of life and the promise of returning home to us all, yet as it sounded out of the twilight of my dreams, it brought terrors and remembrance of a time that we are just now coming to understand.

“Five Four Whiskey, this is Niner Four Oscar. If you are unable to respond, break squelch twice.”

As always, I would awake from the dream, and the faceless, metallic voice from the past would lose its hold on me. I would rise, shower, dress, and drive headlong into the workaday world, which is the center of the reality we live in. Days and months would turn into years, and the prospect that the dream was only just that seemed more and more the consideration of a sane man. It was, after all, long past and half a world away.

Nineteen sixty-nine was a year among years. The music of the time described it better than mere prose could ever attempt to do. The radios of America wailed along the AM frequencies, inciting the young to heed the beat of a different drummer. They cried out to us in louder and louder decibels, and we listened. We swore to wear flowers in our hair if we ever went to San Francisco, while our parents swayed gently to the voice of a more rational Tony Bennett, who only claimed to have left his heart in the Bay City. The rest of us seemed to have left our sanity there.

It was a time in which the youth of America had finally kicked open the door to the future and seemed to be standing, wistfully scratching their heads, while trying to decide which way to go. Simon and Garfunkel serenaded us into wishing that we were nonfeeling rocks, while Bob Dylan demanded that we admit to the changing times. The greats of music and drama followed the chemically induced logic of Timothy Leary and tuned in, turned on, and dropped out. We were all taken aback by the sudden and unfettered freedom of the drug culture. It offered us an alternative to all forms of discipline. It was, in fact, the wholesale flight of America from its mundane daily duties that became the real siren's call. It was the absolution from having to take out the trash that caught us all unaware, and myself in particular unprepared. Nineteen sixty-nine caught me with my pants down. In my case, California dreamin’ was becoming a reality.

In 1969, I was at the top and bottom of my form as a young man from a good family. I suppose this statement needs a little explanation. My parents certainly thought that it needed some explanation. I had managed the ultimate catastrophe of the ’60s. I was a twenty-year-old college student who was no longer in college. This is no big thing today, nor would it have been in most periods of our history. In 1969, it could mean only one thing for a boy who came from working stock and was no longer protected from the draft by the infamous 2-S deferment. It meant that it was only a matter of time until that young man was wearing the uniform of his country and showing the flag in other parts of the world, the most prominent of those parts being the now-defunct Republic of South Vietnam. Somehow, I don't believe that this is what those radio personalities had in mind when they shoveled all that Dylan manure at us. I wonder how many of them ended up crawling around in Southeast Asia, trying not to get a third eye? I don't remember seeing Wolf Man Jack at Dau Tieng or Peter, Paul, and Mary in the Ho Bo Woods. Talk about being five hundred miles from my home. They didn't have a clue.

What I'm trying to say is that the songs and movies and stars of the day literally sold us down the river. They painted pictures of life without pain or standards or responsibility. They went to corporate meetings, met contract restrictions, and paid their taxes while portraying to the masses that they were devoid of such dull and tiring chores. They painted the picture so well that we bought it. We didn't just buy it to hang over the couch. We bought it to move into. It is said that neurotics build castles in the sky, and psychotics move in. Well, I moved in, along with much of the youth of America. I moved in and began paying the bills for such a move. I'm still paying them today. We all are.

At this point, I'm sure there is a well-established alarm going off somewhere in your subconscious. It would be warning you of the man on the street corner who is dressed in faded combat fatigues and a bush hat, four decades after the fact. The man now has gray hair and a paunch but seems stuck somewhere in that 365 days he spent on the other side of the world a lifetime ago. The warning bell has probably trained you to smile pleasantly and step around him, unless you find it impossible to courteously avoid a confrontation, which you usually bring to a close with a dollar bill or two. I know this discomfort. I experience it myself. I go through it along with you and hundreds of thousands of veterans of the Vietnam conflict who did not fall into the abyss upon returning home. I step around those poor, experience-locked victims, fumble for cash, and then walk on. I walk on like all the rest who heard the songs, took the fall, and returned to pick up the pieces that were shattered when we were swallowed whole by the military and the times. I walk on, but when I think I am safely out of range, I look back. I look back and strain to see through the gauzelike curtain of the years. I look to see if it is a face I might have known, a name I might remember. I look and I find myself angry and then horrified. How much of a step would it have been for me to go from hearing static-tattered voices in my dreams to standing there on the street like the Ghost of Christmas Past. I wonder what made the difference?